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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/25696168">Always Watching</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/VeloxVoid/pseuds/VeloxVoid'>VeloxVoid</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Fire Emblem Series, Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Descent into Madness, Feral Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd, Gen, Heavy Angst, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Psychological Horror, Psychological Torture, Self-Harm</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-08-03</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-08-03</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-05 07:47:53</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Graphic Depictions Of Violence</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,881</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/25696168</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/VeloxVoid/pseuds/VeloxVoid</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>They are always watching over the little prince. But there are only so many times Dimitri can see Glenn and his father before he decides he does not want to see anymore.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>8</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>27</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Always Watching</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>TW for graphic descriptions of blood, gore, self-harm, eye gore, and seeing ghosts.</p><p>This piece was written as a part of the "Calamity's Advent" zine - a horror/angst-centric zine. It can be found here for free: https://twitter.com/InvincibleZine/status/1290290668787695616?s=20</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <hr/><p> </p><p>
  <em>In the memory, you'll find me,</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Eyes burning up</em>
</p><p>
  <em>The darkness holding me tightly,</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Until the sun rises up</em>
</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>Each breath seared his lungs. He could almost feel the embers catching in his throat - the ashes that floated down from the air around him biting against his insides as he sucked in air.</p><p>Yet, when Dimitri blinked, the ashes were gone. Around him was merely an empty corridor - a little dusty, but bare. He was not on a battlefield, there were no flaming banners around him, but still his lungs burned as he took heaving breaths.</p><p>“Those times are gone,” Dimitri whispered, voice hoarse. He staggered into his bed chambers, tripping over the threshold, and slammed the door behind him.</p><p>The noise made him jump - made his hair stand on end and his every nerve begin to twitch as he turned towards what had made the noise.</p><p>Glenn stood at the door.</p><p><em> Sothis</em>, Dimitri nearly breathed through his lungs that screamed out for air. Glenn looked so much like Felix. The two were almost of an age now; they had the same sleek, blue-black hair and fierce, fiery eyes. But Glenn was wearing the armour that only he could wear, with a butchered and bloody hole through the breastplate from where a weapon had pierced the steel into the soft organs beneath. Felix had never worn that armour. It was Glenn before him, his image shuddering and flickering as though it might fade at any moment.</p><p>He hissed, through a voice thick with blood and bile and foam. “<em>Boar,</em>” he choked out, eyebrows furrowing over his flaming irises.</p><p><em> No, </em> Dimitri wanted to whisper back, shaking his head. <em> I’m not a boar, I promise-- </em></p><p>And Glenn smiled, once-white teeth stained pink by the ichor he choked on. “Only a savage and rotten swine would let me die, little Prince."</p><p>A stabbing pain shot through Dimitri’s heart, making him cry out in a feeble whine. His knees shook, each muscle in his legs crying out in agony as he stood before his lost friend. So many times had he longed for Glenn’s return - to have the man alive once more, to talk with him again. He had begged the Goddess, and the Duscan deities, and whoever Almyra worshipped, pleading for the return of all of those he’d lost. He would have given anything just to see them - just to say goodbye. But, he hadn’t meant like this.</p><p>Never like this.</p><p>Glenn spluttered again, a rattle sounding from deep within his mutilated chest, as though the air were escaping from his punctured lungs. As he did, the fire in his eyes danced, slowly taking form. It became flames, rising from the amber irises to burn them, scorching the pale skin around them black until blood beaded up from beneath and rushed down his smouldering flesh. His eyes melted. The white turned to ooze and dripped from their sockets like snow melting beneath the spring sun.</p><p>And he screamed. Glenn’s mouth opened, scarlet foam rising from his throat, and emitted a gurgling, curdling shriek. The same shriek he had made upon being stabbed – a death wail.</p><p>Dimitri’s blood became ice in his veins, and at last he managed to turn away as his stomach heaved. He had seen Glenn’s dead body once before - had seen the lance protruding from his chest and had stared into those cold, dead eyes. He did not need to see it again. He would rather see anything else.</p><p>But when he turned, he met more eyes. Hundreds of figures filled the room; they materialised from nowhere with flickering visages: some of them transparent, some flashing in and out of existence like dying flames. They each stood around Dimitri, filling the room, staring balefully at him through cold, cruel, pleading eyes. Some he recognised - his own soldiers, his friends, his <em> family </em> - while others were the enemy, garbed in red.</p><p>Only the figure of his father was corporeal. He stood in his fur cloak, with Faerghus’ sigil stitched onto the breast of a velvet doublet. Lambert Blaiddyd smiled with that handsome fatherly comfort, and outstretched his arms to his son. His face was full, cheeks flushed with pink, and his eyes creased at the sides just how they used to, with a weary happiness.</p><p>Dimitri let out a sob. He jolted forwards, stumbling towards the embrace of his father, but stopped in his tracks as he watched; Lambert’s kindly blue eyes became cold in an instant, losing their vibrant hue to be instead replaced with the paleness of icicles. They unfocussed, his smile waned, and a pink line became etched across his neck. Dimitri had only a second for his confusion to twist into fear before the pink line split: it burst open with the urgency of a grape exploding beneath a set of teeth, blood splattering hot and wet across Dimitri’s face. His father’s head fell to the floor with a dull, hollow <em> thud</em>, rolling towards his feet with glazed eyes, blood cascading from beneath his jaw.</p><p>And Dimitri could not breathe. <em> No. Not more. </em> He looked around desperately into each face, all with purple rings around their eyes from eternities of lost sleep, or with black and empty sockets oozing with blood, or maggots, or stinking yellow pus from rotting wounds.</p><p>The stench filled his nose; like the scent of death rising from a thousand corpses rotting on a blood-soaked battlefield; like meat left in the sun on a boiling hot day. Their dying groans and rattling breaths danced through his ears and around his brain like a cat toying with a mouse, wanting nothing more than to tease him, torment him, <em> pain </em> him.</p><p>“You let us die, Dimitri,” some of them whispered, their voices like playful children.</p><p>“Our blood is on your hands.”</p><p>“We didn’t want to die.”</p><p>“<em>Boar King.</em>”</p><p>“Why do you still live?”</p><p>His father spoke out over them all, familiar voice calm and soothing. “Son,” he said, and Dimitri felt tears rise to his eyes. He looked up, and blinked away the liquid that made his vision hot and fogged.</p><p>The image before him was clear. His father was headless, staggering in place to remain upright, with a shattered segment of creamy-white bone jutting up from his severed stump of a neck.</p><p>“Why did you kill me?” his headless father asked.</p><p>His stomach convulsed again. Dimitri turned wildly to run, but he was surrounded. The bodies of the dead and dying began to walk, dragging their feet as they lurched forward, crying and hissing at him. The Boar King’s stomach heaved, his knees giving out until he collapsed onto all fours, heaving hysterical, shuddering breaths.</p><p>“<em>No,</em>” he muttered frantically, rocking back and forth how his mother used to rock him when he’d awoken from a bad dream. “No more, <em> please</em>, no more--”</p><p>The blood from his father’s decapitated skull crept across the floorboards, seeping beneath Dimitri’s hands to warm them and reflecting back up at him the image of his own face - scarlet, and pained, and <em> terrified</em>. It was the face of a boy - of a <em> boar </em> - not of a king.</p><p>It was in that moment that Dimitri decided.</p><p>He did not want to see anymore.</p><p>The muscles in his fingers tightened, itching to destroy. He heard his fingernails scrape against the soft wooden floorboards beneath him, making awful grating sounds as they pulled splinters up beneath his nail beds. Glenn had been right: he was nothing but a Boar King, hellbent on annihilation.</p><p>In a sharp, rapid movement, he thrust his open palms against his face, slapping the skin to leave it crying out in a stinging pain. He dug his nails into the soft flesh of his forehead, feeling them penetrate it with the ease of peeling a peach, smooth and effortless.</p><p>The sensation was almost nice. <em> Relieving</em>. Dimitri could not taste, and in the battlefield, could not sense emotion. To be able to feel <em> something </em> - his fingernails biting deep down into the skin of his forehead - was refreshing.</p><p><em> More</em>.</p><p>Dimitri could not bear to face the images of his ghosts again - not another time. No more Glenn, no more Father, no more dead children and allies and people he’d willingly let die. He brought his fingernails down hard, feeling them make jagged motions as they peeled through the flesh, into the softness of his eyebrows, and let out a strange noise; he was half-pained, half-pleasured, and the only thing circling his mind was relief.</p><p>His right hand slipped. He felt the soft, delicate tissue of his eyelid for only a split second until the daggers that were his fingernails sank into it, beneath it, until they hit the gelatinous fibres of his eyeball.</p><p>Then, he could only scream. The pain was so instant and so blinding - it rocketed throughout his every nerve in one white-hot rush. He pulled his hands away, but all he could register was the searing pain in his right eye - as though a flaming branding iron had been pressed against his cornea and ripped away.</p><p>His own shrieks met his ears again and he realised that, through his agony, he had risen to his feet again. He was staggering, stumbling through the room until he grasped ahold of something - cold and unyielding.</p><p>The sink. His left eye opened, and he swiped the blood from out of it as he gave panicked, heaving sobs, to look in the mirror before him. Before he could, though, a flash of red caught his attention.</p><p>Blood was on his hands, so dark and hot and viscous it could have been tar. It stuck to the smooth granite sink in thick prints from where he’d held onto it in his death grip. Was it <em>his</em> blood, though? Or was it the blood of those he’d killed?</p><p>He breathed heavily, his heart fighting to pump blood around his body - but that blood simply spilled from his wounded eye, adding a pulsating sting to the slash and making him press a palm into it. It burned. It burned worse than the ash had in his lungs, and worse than his nails against his forehead. It burned worse than any wound he’d had before, his eye feeling torn and open beneath his tattered eyelid. He swallowed bile, the metallic tang of his own blood filing his nostrils, and could think only one thought.</p><p>
  <em> You deserve this. You deserve more. </em>
</p><p>Frantic, heavy footsteps filtered through the pulse rushing in Dimitri’s ears. He staggered backwards once more as his head grew heavy, fog seeming to create a vignette around the vision of his left eye.</p><p>Dedue filled it suddenly. He stood in the doorway, where Glenn had once been, with a face of pure mortification.</p><p>“<em>Your Highness!</em>”</p><p>Dimitri had never heard Dedue’s voice like that before: a positive scream, breaking in his throat with panic. Dimitri wanted to see the other man’s face. He wanted to smile, reassure him, and tell him that everything was okay.</p><p>But, as he lowered his hand, dripping with blood, and tried to pry open his sticky, injured eyelid, the pain returned. White light shot into his vision, seeming to burn his brain, before his world became black.</p><p>Dimitri’s last memory was the sensation of falling, and a blunt, pounding pain in his skull.</p>
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